Think Tank Enlists Call of Duty Dev to Help Plan For Real Wars
You might have seen Dave Anthony’s name in the credits of Call of Duty: Black Ops and Black Op II. He was a writer and director for those games, as well as working on several other Call of Duty games.
Anthony is good at planning fake war scenarios. How about real ones? The Atlantic Council, an influential think tank, wants to find out. They’ve brought him on board for a new project called “The Art of Future Warfare,” which looks to artists and people in the entertainment industry to get a fresh perspective on the shape of future wars and terrorist attacks.
“We have a perception of Washington that someone wouldn’t be forward-thinking enough to contact creative people to predict… future conflicts and the nature of what these conflict will be,” Anthony told The Washington Post. “The fact that they contacted a video game director to help them with that was flabbergasting.”
Anthony said artists will “blow apart structure and come up with creative ideas,” Anthony said. “We come at it from an entirely different perspective.”
And the Atlantic Council might have made a good call, because Anthony seems to be looking at trends more linear military thinkers might write off. How about a killer drone the size of an insect that can recognize faces? Yeah, that’s scary, but well within the realm of possibility in the not too distant future, he told Foreign Policy.
Anthony also predicts other scenarios, like groups like ISIS striking “soft targets” in the U.S., and says we should plan for these today.
“I don’t want to hear the answer of, ‘Well, you know, there’re so many different things that you can’t even predict where it’s going to be. I think it can be generalized, and you can put measures in place which are not in place right now to deal with that kind of thing,” he said.
Anthony is going to be appearing at an Atlantic Council event called “The Future of Unknown Conflict” in Washington, DC on October 1 to talk about his predictions. You can read more about it here.